Hello all,

I've been a user of mods for long time and have done some basic things in the CS and with making a few simple mods of my own, but little experience beyond that. In previous installs, I've attempted at making companion mods similar to the one I'm trying to create now, but I think my methods were a bit messy and cumbersome before, so I'm looking to refine them before I mess things up.

I'm contemplating my idea for a companion mod using the excellent companion command system in CSR and need some advice on how to get some things done. This would be a companion pack adding around 8 companions of varying mod added races, and though I've worked a bit with custom race companions in the past, they turn out a bit messy. I normally would use TES4Edit to do this, selecting each mod I would like to include races from as well as my own mod, then copying as override into my own mod all the races, hairs, eyes, etc. from each mod. I found this method is quite messy in practice, because it would create duplicates before actually working in the CS, and I had duplicates of the duplicates in the CS before the hairs, eyes, and races can actually be seen ingame.

I recently read the http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/De-Isolation_Tutorial at CS Wiki in an attempt to make this mod a bit cleaner, and I'm conflicted as to which method to use. I'm leaning away from making all the race mods in .ESM Masters because then I have all these masters to worry about because I'm planning to use around 3-4 different race mods. I'm thinking that the second method might be the best one in this situation, ESMifying to make a Master and then returning it to an .ESP, but like I said, I'm still pretty inexperienced and unsure, so if anyone can suggest which method, I would appreciate the assistance!

Another thing I wanted to ask was about doing the same for other resources. For now in my personal use I'm just going to go find the mod-added items I want for my characters in the game world and give them to them, but say I get permission to use armor and weapons from other mods that go well with each character concept and want them to be the default armor for the companions. How would I go about using those resources? I suppose I could just give download requirements and make them masters, but that might lead to an absurd amount of requirements for a single companion mod, and plenty of masters for the plugin. This is just theoretical right now though, because I'm not even certain anyone else would really want these companions are not (actually using old PCs to base the companions off lol).

Please give any help or advice you can if you can spare the time.

Thanks!
Leold

there are many ways to move data around but perhaps the cleanest method is to use cs and build your own esp. start by copying the hair and eyes that you like from the source esp to yours. keep in mind that not all eyes will work with each other do to different mesh models. so to copy these hair and eyes we need both the source an destination esp's loaded with the destination as active. duplicate the hair's you want and rename them to what ever. now when ever you save your esp all the hair and eyes will be in yours esp and will have no dependency on the source esp. there is no need to copy all the hair and eyes just the one's you like. now it is time to copy races and you can do this in the same way except that you will want to delete all the hair and eye ref's from the race and replace them with your own. by doing it this way you will have no dependency's to deal with and your only problem will be the actual textures and meshes. you can state that to make your mod work that they will need to install these race mods to have the texture's and meshes necessary to make your mod work.